


get your epitaph right

by mrecookies



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Families of Choice, Gen, Non-Linear Narrative, Origami, Platonic Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-04
Updated: 2013-09-04
Packaged: 2017-12-25 15:14:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,422
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/954626
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mrecookies/pseuds/mrecookies
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Of ghosting and drifting, folding and releasing, living and dying.</p>
            </blockquote>





	get your epitaph right

Surfacing is easy. Her lungs burn with her gulping breaths of fresh air, and an overwhelming mix of relief and guilt smashes into her like a nightmare on wheels. It’s the silence that hits hardest.

It doesn’t matter that her body is yelling for her to stop. She fills the silence with the sound of rushing water in her ears as she pulls herself to the other pod. On any ordinary day, she’d cross the paltry distance in seconds. As it is, she’s still clammy and shaking from more than just the cold; it takes far too long for her fingers to touch glass and steel. Salt is everywhere, stinging her wounds inside and out. Her eyes blur at the sight of a pale face in the pod; she can’t even remember hauling herself onto it.

Resolutely, she refuses to think of it as a metal coffin. A slam of her palm means that she can finally resolve the gentle itching in her skin. She presses two fingers to his throat, waits for the pulse that stays stubbornly still—it’s just like him to go against the flow, even now—and breaks the overwhelmingly suffocating silence with her voice, as weak and breathless as it is at the moment.

 

*

 

Mako gives the blond boy the wariest look she can manage. She watched as he threw a tantrum loud enough to make her sensei wince. Now he’s quiet but sulking across the carpet in sensei’s office, his father with her father in a very important meeting.

“Do you want to play?” she asks, because it’s only polite, since she has so many jaeger toys after all. The boy glares at her, and she unconsciously rubs the model of Coyote Tango—her favourite, of course—with her thumb. Mako repeats the question; perhaps he didn’t hear her the first time. It took her a long time to speak up after—after Onibaba.

The boy doesn’t answer, so she shrugs and turns back to her jaegers, cheeks red from the unsaid rejection. A shuffling noise behind her grabs her attention, and she looks up to see the boy scuffing his trainers against the red carpet. She should tell him to stop that, but bites her tongue. He is her guest, after all. “I’m Chuck,” he says in a small voice, his accent a different kind of warmth from hers.

“My name is Mako Mori.” Awkwardly, she inclines her head in lieu of a bow, and flushes at how the words stumble from her lips.

“I’m gonna be a jaeger pilot,” Chuck says proudly, picking up Brawler Yukon. His reverence in handling the toy doesn’t go unnoticed by Mako, who approves with a little nod.

“Me too.” This time, she sounds more confident, and she even ventures a smile. Chuck rises in her estimation when he takes her seriously and shakes her hand.

 

*

 

To rebuild a jaeger is to know her inside out. To know a jaeger is to know her pilots.

Mako already knew the first when she was given the lead position on the Mark-III Restoration Project, the name grander than it means in real life when they only have one Mark-III jaeger in the Shatterdome. The second comes as a realization after the first few days of initial, urgent repairs: what goes next?

Right now, only the bare minimum number of technicians and engineers are working on Gipsy Danger, the rest awaiting her orders that will have to be on the Marshal’s desk by the weekend. Grasping her clipboard, she firms her stance as she walks through Gipsy, reverently noting her broken heart and her broken arm. The latter flares up with golden and silver sparks as the engineers weld new plates—new skin—over where the old used to be. The small area another group is working on exposes Gipsy’s frayed nerves; they’re pulling new tubes and wires to completely improve her nervous system.

Gipsy needs to be as fast as she was, faster even.

Mako enters the shattered Conn-Pod. It hits her, less intensely than her first time, but still powerful: the burning ghost of death against her skin.

“Yancy Becket,” she begins, lifting her eyes gravely to view the space where a harness should be. Like giving an eulogy at a funeral, she lists Yancy’s achievements, voice soft and solemn, and ends with the mission report. The right hemisphere, once a void in her head, connects with a superficial understanding of who the elder Becket brother was. It's as if Gipsy is responding to her words.

Mako takes a deep breath and proceeds to the right hemisphere. Raleigh Becket. She imagines the harness twitching, as if waiting for the man to appear and lean back into it—the breeze against her face tells her otherwise. Still, it is easier to grasp Gipsy’s nature and that of her pilots’, even though it’s only a brief glance at what they had been together, Gipsy and Yancy and Raleigh.

“I will understand,” she whispers to the darkened console. She refuses to think that what she’s doing might seem stupid and superstitious to others. “I will fix you. For family.”

A small shudder goes through the jaeger. Mako leaves.

 

*

 

They return as heroes. Suddenly everyone wants to talk to them, and like when they came back from saving Striker Eureka and Hong Kong, there is no time for them to celebrate or grieve.

At least, until Herc Hansen—Marshal Hansen now—yells at the crowd and they leave. They don’t have jaegers anymore, but the Shatterdome workers are enough to chase the military and the press out of their home.

“Bloody vultures. Not even an hour and they’re swoopin’ down,” Herc mutters, as they walk down the corridors. The black look on his face steers any well-meaning passersby away. Mako doesn’t think Herc realizes that they’re in his and Chuck’s room until Herc noticeably chokes on his rant in the middle of the doorway. “Vultures,” he says, face ashen, and Mako watches him collapse at the desk.

Raleigh runs forward to comfort him, and Mako should do the same, really, but a burst of colour in the bunker catches her eye. The exoskeleton of numbness she’s been keeping around her like a jaeger’s skin breaks. A folded piece of paper shouldn’t be that special, but she remembers every crease of this particular one.

Herc clears his throat. “My son always knew what he wanted to do.”

 

*

 

The fourth crane Chuck tries to fold tears in half just as he’s pulling the wings outwards. He tosses it aside with an angry cry.

Mako ignores it, just like she’s ignored his complaints about not needing to be coddled as a teenager about to be the youngest Ranger in the Academy. “Try again,” she says serenely, handing him another piece of origami paper, this time with a sakura pattern.

“Don’t know why I’m doin’ this—this girl stuff,” Chuck grumbles, but sits down next to Mako.

“You need to learn patience and precision.” Mako smiles at Chuck’s childish repetition of her words; sometimes it’s hard to believe that he is older than she is.

“Yeah, well.” He manages it, finally, tongue stuck out in concentration. A loud whoop erupts as the clumsy but intact crane falls to the floor, and suddenly Mako’s squealing as she’s being tugged up into an impromptu dance around the room. “Do you believe in it?” he asks, after they wind down and flop onto the carpet. His fingers caress the completed sakura crane with a gentleness Mako’s seen him reserve for Max and jaeger parts.

She knows he’s not talking about Ranger qualities. “I have to,” she answers, scooping her fifty-five cranes up with the skirt of her dress. One by one, they spill into the glass jar, filling it up to the brim. Satisfied, she screws on the top and tucks the jar away on a shelf with four others. “I think of my mother and my father when I fold them.”

Chuck looks at his battered crane and tweaks the beak. Mako bites her lip and passes him one of her many empty jars. “I’ll help you.”

He drops the crane in. “Nine hundred nighty-nine to go.”

Mako grins and mocks his accent, loving the way the vowels roll around in her mouth like marbles. He lunges towards her, laughing, and they end up dancing around the room again, teenagers playing at being Rangers.

 

*

 

The day comes when the Hong Kong Shatterdome is finally decommissioned. Mako stands beside Herc and Raleigh, one of the last jaeger pilots in the world. It’s a proud moment, yes, but a quiet one too, in spite of the bustling city of Hong Kong going about its business across the waters.

“It’s surreal, ain’t it?” Herc says. Max barks once, as if to agree, tongue lapping at the wind.

The Pacific Ocean is calm and still in the dark orange of the setting sun. There is where Striker Eureka lost power. There is where the Wei Triplets lost their lives. There is where the Kaidonovskys perished. Kaiju and jaegers alike, joined in the deep blue.

Raleigh nudges her out of her mood. She experiences a sense of déjà vu; her sensei used to cough very lightly when she was much younger for the same reason. “You okay?” There is no need for the Drift now that the Kaiju are all gone—though Mako knows that the technology is in no way obsolete—for which she is grateful and sad. But there is a kind of connection that builds between jaeger pilots through the Drift that is unique and separate to it. Ghosting. Sometimes, she finds herself reaching for Raleigh unconsciously across the non-existent Drift in her mind, waiting for an absent neural handshake that will not happen, and an answering tug on her hand will assure her that Raleigh’s there. Still, there is discordance in the way they communicate out of the Conn-Pod, a greater reliance on words and physical gestures, and Mako cannot shake it even after a year.

“Yes,” she says, and adds, without thinking, “we almost died here.” Luckily, Herc is petting Max, grieving in his own way, and hasn’t heard.

Raleigh hums tunelessly, and murmurs, “But we didn’t.” 

 

*

 

The year that Mako turns twenty is a turning point in her life. It is marked by Raleigh Becket striding towards her on a rainy day at the Shatterdome. Gipsy’s son is returning home.

He doesn’t look a lot like what she expected. She knows his face, of course, but never thought of seeing the depth of feeling in his eyes. His mouth looks like it could curve into a friendly smile at any time, or set in a stubborn slant in defiance of protocol. He looks weathered, old—much like Gipsy.

And he treats her like an equal.

The sparring session in the Kwoon proves that to be true. Mako forgets about being mortified at being caught out twice, and embraces the challenge, finding the Drift even when there isn’t any neurochemicals being pumped into her system. He calls it a dialogue, a dance, and Mako answers with her first move. 

After, she concludes that he is indeed worthy to pilot her Gipsy. When he claims her as his co-pilot, his sister, his partner in the Drift, she stands tall in front of her sensei. She knows she is worthy, too.

 

*

 

Chuck leaves for the Academy first, and he comes out as a Ranger so fast that they would have given him an award if the world were still in a rewarding mood. Mako eyes him, the blond boy she knew, and sees the new cockiness in his walk, the exaggerated drawl in his mouth.

“I’ve got no time on my hands for this shit,” he says, after Mako gifts him with more origami paper. She’s been keeping up with the cranes for both their stashes of jars, but he needs to take over his own cranes and finish the thousand for his mother. “Haven’t you heard? I’m a Ranger. The best in the Academy.”

Mako rolls her eyes. “I know.” She thrusts the papers at him obstinately until he accepts them with a put-upon sigh. “You need two hundred more.”

In her bed, she mourns for the sour-faced boy who’d grouch but sit next to her on a red carpet to fold origami cranes. In the morning, she finds out that the Hansens are about to be assigned to the Sydney Shatterdome. Chuck gets into a screaming row with his father when she visits their bunker; she puts the jar of cranes on the desk and flees.

 

*

 

Mako dreams.

She dreams that Gipsy malfunctions and that it’s all her fault, that they’re in water and drowning and she can’t get to Raleigh because she’s not fast enough—

She dreams of Onibaba crashing through the ghost town of Tokyo, of the silence in between giant footfalls and her screaming and the whirring sound of helicopters and gunfire and her sensei—

She dreams about Chuck and origami cranes, about the soggy piece of paper in sakura pattern that they found in Chuck’s suit when his pod floated up almost too late and the Japanese word for ‘brother’ that formed fragile like glass jars in her mouth—

 

*

 

“There are two more pods, sir.” Tendo’s voice trembles through the intercom. She sees Herc collapse all over again, Max barking and licking worriedly at his feet.

“We’ll meet you in the sickbay.”

They walk like ghosts down the corridors buzzing with rumors of pods surfacing out of the Pacific Ocean. The murmurs hush when they pass; Mako hurries them along.

Saying goodbye is easy. Saying it again is harder. She looks down at the empty pod, fingers tracing the still-new lining dry from disuse. Across from her, Herc’s embracing Chuck, who’s shivering in the thin gown the medical officers have draped over him. She can hear words that they should have said before floating in between them. They are, approximately, the same words that fill the escape pod on the metal table in front of her.

“You okay?” Raleigh asks, nudging her side.

Mako’s mind flashes to the one thousand cranes folded and packaged neatly in ten glass jars sitting in her sensei’s office. She stares critically at the escape pod, measuring the size within. “Yes,” she says, and looks up to meet Chuck’s relieved eyes over his father’s shoulder.

Raleigh grabs her in a one-armed hug. He’s been in her head, he knows. “I’ll help.”

**Author's Note:**

> based on headcanon with [frenchie](http://raysperson.tumblr.com) and [nurul](http://herchuckhansens.tumblr.com). written for frenchie's birthday! the title comes from snow patrol's 'take back the city'.


End file.
